THE WARSAW GHETTO OF TODAY

I am forwarding to you an article I wrote more than seven years ago on the situation in the Gaza Strip. Today, Gaza is in a very worse shape than ever before. Gaza is more or less a real concentration camp where people are dying a slow but agonizing death due to the 12-years-old Israeli siege which is no less harsh than the Nazi siege of Ghetto Warsaw..

Gaza is the “Warsaw Ghetto” of our time and Israel is responsible

Khalid Amayreh

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Sometimes, I feel I can’t communicate to the reader the full extent of the harshness of reality. This is not because words are failing me or I seriously lack the gift of gab. It is rather because reality is too harsh and too overwhelming, so much so that language alone stands helpless to convey or describe it properly and adequately.

I am forwarding to you an article I wrote more than seven years ago on the situation in the Gaza Strip. Today, Gaza is in a very worse shape than ever before. Gaza is more or less a real concentration camp where people are dying a slow but agonizing death due to the 12-years-old Israeli siege which is no less harsh than the Nazi siege of Ghetto Warsa..

Who is responsible?

Well, you don’t have to have a degree in Middle Eastern Studies to know the answer.

NAZIS PAR EXCELLENCE

November 19, 2008

By Khalid Amayreh in Israeli-Occupied Palestine

Israeli propagandists routinely dismiss comparisons between Nazi Germany and Israel as “corrupt” and “far-fetched.” Some Zionists would even argue that only pathological anti-Semites would dare make such comparisons.

However, in light of what Israel has been and is doing to the Palestinians, including the present ruthless blockade of the Gaza Strip, and the slow, agonizing death meted out to innocent Gazans, any honest person shouldn’t fail to observe the striking similarity between the Nazi mentality and the collective Israeli mindset.

The Nazis viewed their victims as “Untermenschen” while Zionist Jews simply refer to their equally tormented victims as “terrorists” or “potential terrorists.”

Even a 7-year-old Palestinian school child is often referred to in Israel as “a terrorist child.”

Needless to say, the demonizing, dehumanizing language is meant to make the readers, viewers and listeners hate the victims. This is exactly what the Nazis did during the Second World War.

For example, when a Jewish resistance fighter was killed in one of the many Jewish communities throughout Nazi-occupied Europe, the German and other pliant press would report the event with a caption reading “ a bandit fell to his death” or “a bandit emerges from his hideout.”

Many of the fighters would rather jump to their death from the a fourth or fifth floor than hand themselves over to the SS, very much like Palestinian freedom fighters are doing these days.

Today, the Israeli army and media use nearly identical epithets in reference to Palestinian victims of Israeli Nazism. They only replace the word “bandit” with the word “terrorist.” The rest is almost a verbatim rendition from German to Hebrew.

But, of course, the matter goes beyond Semantics. Israel today is imposing a manifestly brutal siege to the 1.5 million inhabitants of the Gaza Strip, which is strikingly similar to the German siege imposed on the 350,000 Jewish inhabitants of Ghetto Warsaw in 1942.

Yes, the modalities and circumstances may be somewhat different. But the mentality, the hatefulness and vindictiveness are undoubtedly the same.

The Israelis are cutting off food, electricity, fuel and gas supplies to the Gaza Strip, causing a human disaster on a very large scale.

The Germans did the same at Ghetto Warsaw, but on a comparatively smaller scale.

It is true that Israel is not transporting Gazans to death camps as the SS did at Ghetto Warsaw. However, it is also true that that Israel is killing and maiming Palestinians in droves, nearly on a daily basis as a result of denying them access to adequate food and health care, which causes many ill-Gazans to succumb to their often treatable illnesses.

This week, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navi Pillay, spoke of a real humanitarian disaster in Gaza where hundreds of thousands of people are being starved for political reasons.

“We are talking about 1.5 million Palestinian men, women and children are deprived of their most basic human rights for months.”

The words used by Pillay fall short of fully communicating the extent of the gigantic human disaster facing the people of Gaza where an entire people are pushed to the brink of physical extermination on no other account than them wanting to be free from Israeli Nazism.

Unfortunately, Israel, a country ruled by fascist politicians and former army generals who are war criminals par excellence , is constantly emboldened by the disgraceful silence or acquiescence of western powers, including the United States and Europe.

This Nazi-like state continues rather unflinchingly the sadistic policy of starving Gazans in the hope that they will rise up against their democratically elected government and join the American-backed regime in Ramallah, which many Palestinians have come to view as a quisling entity, very much like the Judenrate or Jewish councils that ran Jewish communities on behalf of the Nazis throughout Nazi-Occupied Europe.

I really don’t understand how Jews, who produced luminaries like Albert Einstein, are allowing themselves to behave in this visibly barbarian manner? Do they feel particularly virile and manly when they watch babies succumb to death due to lack of medicine or absence of health care?

Do they feel that by starving and killing innocent Gazans, they are punishing the Nazis vicariously?

I am raising these questions because I know there are hundreds of thousands of Israeli Jews and non-Israeli Jews who are gleefully enjoying the macabre suffering of hundreds of thousands of innocent Gazans, at the hands of their “Jewish army,” the “most moral army in the world.”

Well a truly moral army doesn’t behave like this. Only an army of thugs, gangsters, vile criminals, and psychopaths would withhold food and medicine from dying children?

It is only an army of a Wehrmacht style and political leaders of Hitler’s ilk that refuse to allow ill men and women seek urgently-needed medical care to proceed to their destination in the West Bank and Jordan?

What does preventing ill people from seeking medical care abroad have to do with security? Is saving a child’s life a serious threat to Israel’s security and territorial integrity?

What does preventing a truckload of flour or wheat from reaching Gaza have to do with security?

Well, it is the old adage: crime and lie go hand in hand.

Yes, these are the very people who have made the holocaust their ultimate religion, the people who think that Nazi atrocities during the Second World War justify the slow-motion genocide being meted out to the helpless Palestinians.

European governments are also shamefully watching the unfolding tragedy in Gaza, but are saying virtually nothing and doing nothing to stop it.

European diplomats, like British Foreign Secretary David Miliband, seem to pay far more attention to Sderot and other Jewish settlements bordering Gaza than to the Dresden-like death camp which Gaza has been transformed into, thanks to the west’s failure to rein in its monstrous brat.

In 1948, Harry Truman, who was instrumental in creating Israel, wrote the following:

“I fear very much that the Jews are like all underdogs. When they get on the top they are just as intolerant and cruel as the people were to them when they were underneath. I regret this situation very much because my sympathy has always been on their side.”

Well, I am afraid that Truman prophecy has been fulfilled. Some people would say that it was fulfilled many many years ago.

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3 Comments

kathleen bridel said,

I am reading a book as to famine in Ireland in 1840s Under occupation for centuries Many died during famine while others made perilous journeys on Fever ships to reach new countries Better lives I had ancestors on Fever ship that came to Canada Many died on journey Conditions were horrendous I support Palestinians because of this Thank you for your writings Kathleen Bridel

Khalid Amayreh said,

Gaza epitomizes the epicenter of the harrowing ethos and pathos of human conscientiousness — the thesaurus to every psychological algorithm imaginable or inflictable upon a dispossessed people.

For more than 60 years and several generations going forward, the people of Gaza — who were culturally and ancestrally uprooted from their homeland — have since steadfastly endured the abysmal scourge of survival and strangulated coexistence.

The credibility of today’s psychology, therefore, cannot be given a conscientious accreditation if its corpus utterly lacks any or all substantial reference to the psychologically inherited traumas of Gazans and the corresponding physical catastrophes they have been continually subjected to.

The paintings below reflect the devastatingly political impact of the world’s calibrated indifference not only to the plight and suffering of the Palestinian people, but of all people displaced through the sanctification of corporately-funded-warfares.

To profit from the proliferation of mass suffering, devastation and death is a war crime of the most heinous nature. Uncondonable in perpetuity and a damning stigma on and of our presence in time’s athenaeum!